A/N: This incorporates an idea I attempted to work with way back when I wrote Something Real and now that I've got a few more years of writing under my belt I think I've actually gotten it to do what I was trying to do way back then. Although this oneshot is more abstract then SR and it's got a totally different purpose.

I should also mention that the repeated use of the phrase "slipping through his fingers" was intentional. As is the instability of the verb tense.

Tangible

It was the most curious as well as the single most horrifying sensation he'd ever had the nightmare to experience; the feeling of solid matter fading suddenly into nothingness, not as if it was dissolving, but as if it was disappearing altogether from time and space right there like when waking from a dream. One second he could feel Kairi's mass brushing his arms, the next she had melted to nothing but air slipping and sliding through his fingers.

It was a sensation he could never hope to aptly describe, nor could words ever convey the depth of his horror at the realization that Kairi—Kairi! His Kairi!—had just slipped through his bare hands and into God-knows-what plane of reality.

And from that moment on she was living up to her namesake—she was like seawater slipping elusively through his fingers every time he tried to grab at her existence. A dream, an apparition, or his heart cruelly reminding him of what he was missing. Or worst of all, physically yet emptily there. He'd never been more aware in his life just how very very much he'd like to simply hold her. Maybe just hold her hand. Feel the warmth of her skin and her heart, and maybe, just maybe, tell her that he'd maybe kind of sort of like to one day maybe—if she'd like—share a paopu fruit with her. Maybe.

But as time went by and that dream fell further and further back into the category of fantasy he found himself farther and farther from the simple days of childhood dreams carved onto stone walls. Until finally he finds himself shouting a promise he knows he can only hope to keep across the widening expanse as she slips, perhaps permanently, from his grasp.

That night he has the dream again—the nightmare, really. Dreams have the connotation of being pleasant, and there is nothing pleasant about the images that invade his sleeping consciousness tonight. She's there, right before him, flying towards him, arms outstretched so he may catch her, and for a split second he can feel her there, her form making contact with his open arms, and he can feel her; he can physically feel her, he has caught her, she is there, in his arms—

But she keeps going. The physical mass is there and then it is not and passing through him and gone altogether.

Fast forward one year, four months, twenty-two days, eighteen hours and thirty two minutes. He hears the footsteps growing louder but they do so too quickly for him to register the significance of their increase in volume, and suddenly it doesn't matter because there is something solid against him.

She is there, in his arms, clinging to him in a manner that borderlines desperate, but he could care less because he's as desperate to have her here as she is to be here.

And she sums it up so beautifully—this is real. And it is. And she's here, and she's in his arms and he can feel her. He wraps his arms around her because he's caught her at last.

He doesn't dare kiss her now, although deep down he really wants to. But everyone is watching, and Sora is fairly certain there is a rule somewhere in the Official Hero Manual that says you don't kiss the princess in front of the bad guy. There is so much to say, so much to tell her, but it all can wait. For the moment, he is content to hold her, to bask in the glorious feel of real skin, real matter stationary and solid and tangible against his own. And for this moment, it is all he really needs because for so long it was all he really craved.

Ever since she slipped through his fingers, all he's wanted is to see her running into his arms.

It's as if no time has passed. As if she slipped from that moment in time and into this one. All is as it should be.

They've finally come full circle.

fin

I own nothing but this humble little corner of the internet. I promise once finals are over I'm going to start writing oneshots with actual plots again. But for now this kind of thing is all my brain will spew.

I realized while writing this that the moment I fell in love with KH wasn't, as I had previous thought, the moment when Sora gives up his heart for Kairi, but instead I think it was that moment when the door to the heart of Destiny Islands opens up and Kairi comes flying towards Sora and he tries to catch her but then she's just gone. And it gave me a heart atttack. Because there was just something so poignant and tragic about it.

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